Bob Dylan Song #35: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

I've always had mixed emotions about this song, not least of which because I used to dislike it in my earlier days as a Dylan fan. Back then, the lyrics felt treacly and clumsy (he rhymed "table" three straight times? Jesus!) and the emotional impact Dylan was shooting for sailed right over my head. These days, though, I've warmed to the song and now consider it one of the best of his acoustic era, just like most other Dylan fans do...with one major exception, which I'll get to in a second. I've grown to love that triplicate rhyme, which now feels to me like a hammer rhythmically striking a nail right on the head, and that marvelous chorus with its brilliant final line of "now ain't the time for your tears", and the way that Dylan paints a picture with his pen (like Norman Mailer) to put that horrible incident and resulting trial right smack in the middle of your cerebral cortex. Any number of people have analyzed this song and concluded that it is a high water mark in Dylan's career, and I will not argue against that.

But my mixed emotions now come from the fact that I know a little more about the circumstances of the song, and about the infamous William Zantzinger and his life before and after the writing of "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll". The song's still a masterpiece, with language that curls and bends like the Mississippi River and a powerful command of words that builds to that final verse and the punch to the gut that is "William Zanzinger/with a six month sentence". But the man himself, held up as the scourge of all welcoming and tolerant mankind, has undoubtedly been slandered, even just a little, and that makes things a little tougher to get my head around.

Clinton Heylin, who has given me a mental workout as I search for synonyms for "curmudgeon", has reserved some particularly barbed words for Dylan regarding this song, stating that Dylan "verges on the libelous" by his portrayal of Zantzinger in the song. Whether or not that's entirely true, there are still elements of the song that make Zantzinger out to be some sort of demonic figure, and there are very few people actually like that in real life. His crime may not have been racially fueled - it's hard to believe it isn't, but work with me here - but he has now been branded as such for the rest of his life, and that is a label that is incredibly hard to shake. Just ask Mark Fuhrman. There's also the factor of Zantzinger's drunkenness, which we all know tends to put people in a different frame of mind, and while one could argue that that simply brought out his latent racism, one could also argue that it also brought out an entirely different man.

We don't know very much about Zantzinger, outside of his wealth and subsequent infamy, the crime he committed, and his crimes after the manslaughter trial. His wife, in one of the funniest and craziest possible defenses of him, said that "nobody treats his niggers as well as Billy does around here" (I mean, think about that!). But we don't really know the man, or how he lived his life prior to hitting Hattie Carroll with that toy cane, or what he's like around his house, or with his drinking buddies, or with his family. We only have a portrait from Dylan, a man who couldn't possibly have known any of those things either, and that isn't really sufficient. There's Zantzinger the real person, and Zantzinger the Dylan-created straw man, and nobody seems to be able to tell the difference anymore.

I'm reminded of the great baseball player Ty Cobb, who played during the turn of the 20th century and is regarded as one of the 5 best hitters to ever play the game. Cobb came from Georgia, and has more or less been branded a racist his whole life, often with good reason. He has also, according to some, gone out of his way to be helpful to black people, and went on public record as a supporter of integration in baseball. That begs the question of what made Cobb feel a certain way towards black people to begin with, one that obviously had to eat at him and make him question himself from time to time. He did, after all, grow up in a state where virulent racism has been rampant for centuries, in an impoverished area that had to foster even more hatred for blacks, and was basically surrounded with the idea that blacks were an inferior race. I don't know about you, but that seems to be hard to shake.

Look, everybody knows that you're not born a racist. Racism has to be injected into you, more often than not at a young age, and fostered in your mind until you're old enough that the feeling just stays there with only the barest hint of rhyme or reason. And it's not just your parents or family that can do that; society plays just as large a role in helping that hatred flower (Dylan makes that sort of point in "Only A Pawn In Their Game"; he does it better here, IMO). Obviously that can make hatred easy to explain away, and I don't want to do that; grown men and women are responsible for their actions and for the way that they feel. Still, it seems irresponsible to simply say "hey, you're a racist, and that's all your fault". It rarely ever is.

Part of what makes "Hattie Carroll" such an undeniable masterpiece is that it's so effective in making Zantzinger the straw man; putting the metaphorical devil's horns on his head. In those four poetic verses, you get the crime, the motive (or lack thereof), the sympathy, and the gutwrenching aftermath, and you realize how well Dylan managed to take centuries of suffering and conflate all that pain, anger, and oppression into a story of a murder in a Baltimore hotel. The other part of it, though, is the black and white (so to speak) painting of a hero and a villain, necessary because it makes things so much easier that way. Hattie Carroll might not have been a hero in the ancient sense, but she is definitely a sympathetic figure, and it makes painting Zantzinger as the pure villain all the easier. Perhaps it's a necessary evil, but it still doesn't quite feel right, like Dylan cut a corner somewhere along the way.

I'm certain I'm not telling you anything new or blowing your mind, maaaaan; I don't suppose I could, when it comes to a song like this one. There are chapters in books dedicated to this song, for the love of Pete - like trying to summarize King Lear, my effort will only be diminished by "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"'s majesty. All the same, it's worthwhile rolling these issues and thoughts over in my mind, even as I give the song yet another listen and marvel at how those sentences string together and create a whole story from start to finish as well as any screenplay about Hattie Carroll's death ever could. Songs like this one might not tell us a lot about Zantzinger (other than what we already believe), but they can tell us a lot about the man who wrote the song, and - I'm already cringing writing this, but it's true - about ourselves.